Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench...

I am a vampire, and that is the truth.

It was one thing to talk about ghosts, quite another to have them messing around with things in the physical world.

He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through...

I don’t know. How can you know? I…I’m a monster. When I’m hungry, I might do anything.””Oh no, of course I couldn’t possibly understand you.” Violet’s shadowed face seemed to be wearing a grim and...

Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it.

He handed me something done up in paper. ‘Your mask,’ he said. ‘Don’t put it on until we get past the city-limits.’ It was a frightening-looking thing when I did so. It was not a...

No one can help but stare at the monster, because horror is a cousin to awe.

As the thing came closer, what was left of Nick’s body became revealed and I could see how the dead boy’s eyes had bled from the trauma inflicted upon him; they dripped with steady succession...

I could hear the chaotic laughter trailing behind me. It turned the ageless trees into a menace. They loomed around me, while hiding him. The branches tore at my skin in an effort to bind...

The same sensations that you get in heavy metal are in horror movies. Heavy metal sounds evil and horror movies are evil, ha ha!

Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see – each with their peculiar propensities,...

Sherman Reilly Duffy of the pre-World War I CHICAGO DAILY JOURNAL once told a cub reporter, ‘Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He...

That her niece should find such profound pleasure in the company of a thirteen-year-old black girl–and, more to the point, always within the precincts of Elinor’s house–was a slap in Mary-Love’s face. She decided, without...

I can’t imagine you give apologies, Ten had said before, and she’d been right, but Liraz thought that she would now, She would apologize for Savvath. If her voice was her own. If it wasn’t...

When Lisa awoke she was back in the cell on the floor covered in her own blood, dirt, and urine. And that was only day 1.

My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother’s horror, and he’d clap for trees that he thought...

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll...

This was to be my last trip. Sailing great distances was dangerous, and not very profitable in today’s world. I walked down the worn wooden step to the captain’s cabin, the creaking of the ship...

Ask yourself what a man without guile might do to your body in the dark.

Han reste sig, lämnade toaletten. Lät blodfläcken på golvet vara. Låt någon se den, låt någon undra. Tro att någon blivit dödad här, eftersom någon hade blivit dödad här. För hundrade gången i ordningen.

The sound of him drinking was indescribable—like dirty runoff down a storm drain.

A riverless silence made the air heavy.

They walked until the light died in the sky. Until it was dark, and Donald started to hear the whispers. They pleaded out to him in languages he couldn’t understand. Except when they were in...

The arms, legs, and torso with head were dragged away in sections as the children were captivated by the drama, zealously chewing their candies with sticky teeth.

Horror is the removal of masks.

Last reason for reading horror: it’s a rehearsal for death. It’s a way to get ready. People say there’s nothing sure but death and taxes. But that’s not really true. There’s really only death, you...

At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens as all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule...

Pack up all my care and woe, blackbird, bye-bye

Profanity is the expression of a lesser mind.

Pictures … flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night.

When the great ship containing the hopes and aspirations of the world, when the great ship freighted with mankind goes down in the night of death, chaos and disaster, I am willing to go down...

In supernatural horror stories, however, magical thinking is a completely different matter. Those characters contending with what seems to be the work of magic will deny till the very last moment that anything magical is...

When it’s my time, and the reaper calls my name, there will be no stink of fear on me, and my only wish will be to die with grace, covered in the blood of my...

The rumor claims that the shambler virus is now airborne. It can be contracted without getting bitten now.” – character quote

You’ll be pretty again, I promise.

No matter how dire a situation may be, I can always find the humor in it somewhere. If I was ever in a horror movie I would be the goofy one who doesn’t seem to...

He knew his vampire ‘sisters’ would drain the girls until they were nearly dead, then feed them some of their own blood. That’s when the turning would start – as vampire and human blood mixed...

It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.

Do you know how to hide a dead body?

Gut ist der Schlaf, der Tod ist besser

The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this–whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude...

To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from...

…My hands shook, and I stared at them. Another loss of control. That was the second time this month. Sooner or later, I’d break, if the department didn’t put me down first.

Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.

The first horror is there’s horror. The second is you accommodate it.

I like stories about supervillains. They teach children that you can accomplish great things even when the whole world is against you.

But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced....

Henry,’ at last said one, again dipping the spoon into the flaming spirit, ‘hast thou read Hoffman?”I should think so,’ said Henry.’What think you of him?”Why, that he writes admirably; and, moreover, what is more...

I said, ‘If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn’t we meet them a long time ago?